Prefabrication experiments - 159 - Open Building - 10 - Sharing architecture

Open building theory outlines different approaches for empowering a building’s users. The theoretical framework relates particularized and collective needs while clearly delineating their limits to avoid systemic entanglement and restricting adaptability options.  Generated from a reaction to dogmatic modernism, user-defined organisations and user based planning sought to sanction inventive dialogue between designers and users. The potential to overtly share and communicate a system’s defining rules for both design input and output is central to the success of a participatory process.  Open and industrialized building systems relate on a basic level to the ability to socially construct a model: sharing the system’s guidelines and permitting a great number of permutations.

Walter Segal’s self-build method discussed in blog post, prefabrication experiments – 56- is a notable example.  This type of open knowledge distribution about buildings is less common in architecture than it is in the open source world of software development. In the digital world, an increasingly exploding knowledge database links users to data in a recursive discussion about an infinite number of topics placing the potential previously restricted information squarely on the laps of everyone (the crowd). Further the accessibility of laser cutters, 3d printers and even small cobots is driving a revolution in on-line sharing, turning everyday individuals into veritable small manufacturers.

The success of arduino.cc authenticates this sharing model. A long way from a building, but complex process builds none the less, arduino identifies potentials for an open building culture to enter the realm of materiality. DIYourselfers are a major part of this budding movement taking over all spheres of material culture. Although not prevalent, the open sharing of information is percolating in certain segments of architecture. The wikihouse project, Alejandro Aravena’s Villa Verde and the web platform paperhouses.co elucidates the way architecture is integrating an open source model. Theses three architect driven manifestos explore ways to share knowledge and architecture in order to democratize design quality. Particularly «paperhouses.co» invites architects to design and upload their projects and subsequently contribute to individual builds and comment on iterations made by potential self-builders. The uploaded designs are intended to start a discussion in a discipline that sometimes (more often than it should) is exclusive to those who can afford it.

From paperhouses.co